Disappointing to some professionals, I’m sure, is the fact that two disorders didn’t make it into the DSM-5 at all — not even in the chapter “Conditions for Further Study.”
Those two lonely disorders? “Internet addiction” and parental alienation disorder.
This is a nice respite from the hype surrounding both these concerns and reaffirms what we’ve been saying here for years — these are not mental disorders. Do some people have a usually-temporary and almost-always transitory problem with figuring out how much time to spend on the Internet? Sure they do — it’s just not a disorder-level concern.
And the evidence is simply too sparse for “parental alienation disorder,” which I believe has propagated more for legal than clinical reasons.